(1913-2010) UK politician and author, a Labour member of Parliament from 1945 to 1992, and leader of the Labour party from 1980 to 1983; he resigned this position after losing the 1983 election against Margaret Thatcher. Much of his early journalism was written as by Cato, under which name he attacked the British government's appeasement policy towards Nazi Germany; his one fiction of sf interest, The Trial of Mussolini: Being a Verbatim Report of the First Great Trial for War Criminals Held in London Sometime in 1944 or 1945 (1943 chap) as by Cassius, puts into a Near Future frame his thoughts about World War Two, with political arguments about how the victors should handle the war's aftermath. H.G.: The History of Mr Wells (1995) reflects his lifelong interest in H G Wells as writer and revolutionary thinker. His introduction to the 2005 edition of Wells's The New Machiavelli (1911) is of particular interest as a personal memoir. [JC]

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We passed a couple of major milestones on 1st August: the SFE is now over 4.5 million words, of which John Clute’s own contribution has now exceeded 2 million. (For comparison, the 1993 second edition was 1.3 million words, and … Continue reading →

We’ve reached a couple of milestones recently. The SFE gallery of book covers now has more than 10,000 images: this one seemed appropriate for the 10,000th. Our series of slideshows of thematically linked covers has continued to grow, and Darren Nash of … Continue reading →

We’ve been talking for a while about new features to add to the SFE, and another one has gone live today: the Gallery, which collects together covers for sf books and links them back to SFE entries. To quote from … Continue reading →